Glam’s Incredible Run: Escape From Dukkha

Genre: Platformer

Players: 1

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Review:

Glam’s Incredible Run: Escape From Dukkha, elsewhere just called Glam, is a challenging Platformer released on Nintendo Switch and PC in 2021. This game has players trying to get to the exit in each level by jumping and swinging their way from platform to platform.

The presentation here is pretty good, with some nice pixel art visuals that have a good amount of personality to them. The player’s cartoony main character, enemies, and backgrounds are all colorful and fairly well-animated and have a fair amount of detail. These are backed by a soundtrack with a lot of classic rock-inspired electric guitar that doesn’t quite fit the colorful visuals, but is unique all the same.

The gameplay here is mostly pretty good, features some really inventive level designs, and some fiendishly difficult levels that even seasoned Platformer players will struggle to complete. Thankfully, the game makes it easy to keep retrying, and there’s a good feeling of accomplishment at finally getting a difficult jump right. Having said that, more amateur players who may be attracted by the game’s visuals will find the punishing difficulty to be a bit too much.

However, even if you’re approaching this game as a veteran Platformer player, there are still a few complaints that I have here. Firstly, the default controls here are terrible, forcing you to straddle the A and Y buttons to jump and swing, two of the three most commonly-used buttons of the controls. Thankfully, players can re-assign the game’s buttons at will, but that doesn’t alleviate the game’s other control issue – the inability to use the D-Pad for movement. Players are forced to use the less precise control stick, and that’s frustrating for most games, but it’s absolutely a killer problem here, where a small pixel of difference can mean life or death.

If it weren’t for Glam’s awkward controls, I may well have given it a higher grade, but a challenging game like this lives or dies on its controls, and while Glam does a good job in most other areas, its controls never quite feel natural. Still, for players seeking a Platforming challenge, it’s worth a look, even despite this flaw.

tl;dr – Glam is a challenging Platformer that has players swinging and jumping through levels. This game is punishingly difficult, and while there is some clever level design here and a solid presentation, the game is held down by its awkward controls. Still, fans of the genre may want to give it a look.

Grade: C+

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